Usually it's Apple doing the event thing, but today the thunder's on Google. It held a press event to officially unveil Android 3.0 Honeycomb for tablets, as well as a revamped Android market. Gizmodo has a hands-on of the Motorola Xoom running Android 3.0, as does Engadget. Also today, the Android Market has been updated with a web frontend which allows for the seamless purchase and installation of Android applications from within your browser, which are then pushed to your device(s). In-application purchases have been added as well.

The first of three Fedora project GNOME 3 Test Days is taking place tomorrow (Thursday 2011-02-03) in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC. Join others and the GNOME development team to test out GNOME 3 and help make sure it's stable and polished. The testing is easy, can be done from a live image, so there's no need to have Fedora installed or to be a Fedora user, and you can help out with just ten minutes of your time. This blog post has more details on the event and how you can get involved.

Microsoft did two things today. First, it released an H.264 plugin for HTML5 video for Google's Chrome web browser which makes use of Media Foundation. The usefulness of this plugin is limited, however, since it's only for Windows 7 users. Much more interesting is that Microsoft has opened the door to out-of-the-box WebM/VP8 support in Internet Explorer 9.

"Chrome's usage share for January has made it into double digits: the browser was used by 10.7 percent of Web users last month, up from 9.98 percent in December. It was a good month too for Safari, up to 6.30 percent from 5.89 percent the month before. The WebKit-powered browsers were the big winners: Microsoft's Internet Explorer was the big loser. Internet Explorer reached a new all-time low of 56 percent, down 1.08 percentage points from last month. Though Internet Explorer 8 continues to perform well - up 1.15 points from December - defections from Internet Explorer 6 and 7 to other browsers continue to dominate, with those versions losing 1.63 and 0.47 points respectively. The beta of Internet Explorer 9 made minor gains, rising to 0.50 percent share. Firefox continues to hover between 22 and 23 points; its January share was 22.75 percent, erasing the small gains it made in December. Opera made small gains, up to 2.28 from 2.20 percent a month ago."

"They said it could be done and now they've done it. What's more, they did it with a GRIN. A team of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, have carried out the first experimental demonstration of GRIN - for gradient index - plasmonics, a hybrid technology that opens the door to a wide range of exotic optics, including superfast computers based on light rather than electronic signals, ultra-powerful optical microscopes able to resolve DNA molecules with visible light, and 'invisibility' carpet-cloaking devices."

There is a falling out between governments & ISPs on the one hand and consumer groups and companies like YouTube and Netflix on the other. Lately more punitive measures affecting these companies and consumers have emerged that include increased throttling, greater per-usage billing and lower internet caps. The internet as whole is struggling to find a self-sustaining business model that supports the rising speed and bandwidth requirements of consumers and online media purveyors. The conflict boils down to who should pay and to what degree they should pay.

The web is already aflame with Google's accusation that Bing is stealing its search results. Google created code to manually rank certain bogus search terms, and ten created mock web pages as the top search results for these bogus terms. It turned out that Bing would list the exact same mock web pages as its top search result for these bogus terms. Google is unhappy with it, but in all honesty - since when is it wrong to copy in the computer business?

"Processor design company ARM has today unveiled two new updates to its Cortex-R range of processors: the Cortex-R5 MPCore and the Cortex-R7 MPCore. While the Cortex-A processors can be found in mainstream consumer products such as cell phones and tablet devices, the Cortex-R chips are meant for deeply-embedded and system-on-a-chip duties. Notably you can find the last generation Cortex-R4 in hard disk drive controllers, wireless baseband processors, and automotive systems."

A vulnerability has been reported in Microsoft Windows, which can be exploited by malicious people to conduct cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. The vulnerability is caused due to an error in the way the MHTML (MIME Encapsulation of Aggregate HTML) protocol handler interprets MIME-formatted requests for content blocks within a document.

Well, most of us knew this moment would come, with the only debate left being when this moment would come. Market analyst firm Canalys keeps track of worldwide smartphone shipments, and has concluded that in the fourth quarter of 2010, more Android smartphones were sold than Symbian phones. After a decade of supremacy, the Symbian dominance has been toppled (according to these figures, of course).

"I've always been a great fan of the law of unintended consequences. It takes you places. Unexpected places. Sometimes good, sometimes bad but never a dull moment. The recent kerfuffle over Pirate Bay is too well known to require detailed recounting here. What is really interesting though is where it might just eventually take us in terms of internet freedom. This article describes the one fallout of the legal judgements against Pirate Bay and how its response may unintentionally help to protect and promote internet freedoms."

ChibiOS/RT 2.2.0 has been released. The new release of this open source embedded Real Time Operating System (RTOS) includes support for multiple compilers (Cosmic, GCC, IAR, Keil, Raisonance), drivers and demos for new hardware, internal optimizations and documentation improvements.

"The Intel Atom processor line is associated with low power usage in devices such as a netbook or nettop computer. The emphasis is definitely not on performance, it's on pushing up battery life on a device with a small display and mid-range graphics requirements while still managing a decent desktop experience. Microsoft thinks Atom can do more, though, and wants to use it in servers. With that in mind it is calling on Intel to up the cores in an Atom chip to 16, and deploying it as a low power server chip solution."

"Each time a new version of Windows is released, many computer users find that their hardware is suddenly outdated. For cash-strapped schools, upgrading to the latest hardware with each major software release is simply impossible. A New York startup called NeverWare is offering a possible solution - a server that lets even decade-old PCs upgrade to the latest Windows 7 operating system."